This week's Monday Magick entry is "Station to Station" by Glam-Rocker David Bowie. It comes from the androgynous, multiple identity-flipping stars 1976 LP of the same name. The album was recorded during a tumultuous time, when Bowie was both obsessing over the occult and addicted to drugs.

"Here are we, one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth..." kinda says it all, don't it?

While "Station to Station" certainly isn't Bowie's only foray into the occult, it stands out for the above lyric which remains one of the most explicit references to Jewish Mysticism on wax. In addition to Kabbalah, the album touches on the occultism of Aleister Crowley, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Nazi mysticism, and Grail mythology, themes that informed a great deal of Bowie's output and persona throughout his career.

Terrence Nance ('An Oversimplification of Her Beauty') provides appropriately phantasmagorical visuals for The Dig's ethereal, dreamy Indie-Pop in his two-part mini-movie-length video "You and I and You".

The two songs featured in the clip, "Cold Afternoon" and "So Alone", are drawn from the New York-based quartet's 'You & I' EP which is available for purchase from their Bandcamp page.

This week's Monday Magick entry, "In Ancient Days" by Black Widow, was inspired by a brief mention of the band alongside occult-rockers Coven in Peter Bebergal's new book on popular music and the esoteric 'Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll'. The tune comes from the British Prog-Rock outfit's 1970 CBS Records LP 'Sacrifice'.

I wasn't familiar with Black Widow until coming across their name in association with Coven as one of the few bands of the era who made blatant references to Satanism and the occult in their music. Unsurprisingly, especially considering their similar names, they garnered comparisons to Black Sabbath although their songwriting was far more devilish than anything Ozzy and company put out. "In Ancient Days" for example celebrates the summoning of infernal powers in a highly theatrical fashion using very straightforward language. Even more surprising than the darkness of the lyrics though is the funkiness of the track which leans heavily on a churning groove and plaintive horn line which conjures images of smokey jazz clubs more-so than smoke from the fires of hell. Who knew Satanists could get so soulful?

The band soldiered on long after 'Sacrifice', releasing several albums, seeing personnel changes, and even rethinking their ideology. They were still active as recently as 2011 when they released an album titled 'Sleeping With Demons'.

You might know the name of Denver, Colorado-bred musician Pictureplane from production credits for the likes of Sole, Noah23, and Antown, among others.

But his new single and video "Hyper Real" should make you remember his name for making gorgeous post-Rap Dance-Pop songs with trippy horror-influenced visual accompaniment informed by Goth and Nerd culture.

"Hyper Real", backed with "Total Confusion" featuring Antwon, is out now via the IHEARTCOMIX 1NFINITY label.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

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